okay then. tell me more about trans fawns
YEAHHHHHH BAYBE
So essentially we as real-world humans base our (widely culturally accepted) idea of gender based on sex right? Fauns base their genders on horn shape. Biologically speaking, horn shape IS a secondary sex characteristic, and so has a correlation with sex, but fauns also have a relatively high rate of intersexism (not the right word but sounds closest. I can't find a word for 'the state of being intersex') and so you get a comparative lot of mixing of traits. The other secondary and primary sex characteristics don't matter. If you have x or y horn shape, that's your gender.
So because gender comes from the horns and faun children don't have visibly differentiated horns until anywhere from 10ish to 13ish, faun children are considered genderless. In order for a faun to know they're trans, they must have already grown horns past the point of being identifiably one shape or the other (or the other secret 3rd option that is a common intersex condition fauns accept as a 3rd gender). True horn has a bone core and so can't be removed- once it's there, it's there for good.
Which means two separate but related things: 1) fauns' ideas of gender are very strict and unchanging- they don't have strict gender roles like humans (or satyrs to an extent) do, but they have absolutely no cultural concept of altering gender in any way. If you're a ram, thats it forever and it is an unmoving, inherent fact that is as impossible to change as changing species. Even humans and satyrs have fairy tales about people who swap gender through otherworldly means, and trans humans/satyrs can be seen as their chosen gender if they conform to the preexisting ideas of it. It's still, of course, extremely difficult to get to that point, but if you look and act solidly like a doe, nobody is going to think too hard about if you used to be a stag. The present outweighs the past. But not for fauns. and therefore 2) trans fauns not only have to cross this cultural barrier in order to get to the point where they can think about transitioning, but will never, as long as people know what they were, be really seen as their chosen gender. And people will almost always know, because they can't get rid of their old horn growth. There is no invisibly transitioning for fauns. Hrt will make their horns begin to grow in the other shape, but they will still have the old form as it grew up until that point.
But that's where this secret 3rd option comes in. Because wethers, the 3rd gender beside ram and ewe, are defined by their horns which have both shapes. This occurs naturally in maybe 8-10% of fauns, simply growing that way from adolescence, but is also the shape that happens when fauns of any gender take fantasy hrt of the opposite one. So while fauns cant transition invisibly from ram to ewe, or from ewe to ram, they CAN from ram/ewe to wether.
Wethers are allowed a little bit more leeway in terms of how they function in their genders, and so this can still definitely be an improvement for trans fauns. But also, it might not be ideal for some of them who really want to flip more completely to the other gender. (Wethers are complicated, but are kind of both genders at once, and also neither, and also just their own separate one. It's not a sliding scale from ewe-wether-ram, but it's not not one.)
The nice thing about fauns though is that they dont really associate any sex characteristics (other than horns) with gender. So trans fauns dont have as much struggle in the dysphoria department solely because well... those things don't matter. A faun could have all female primary and/or secondary sex characteristics, but if hes got rams' horns (which happens as an intersex condition, but less commonly than wethers) hes still a ram full stop. this isnt even really seen as an inconsistency or oddity, it just is. Just because there are general patterns to horn shape + sex characteristics, doesnt mean theyre equated.
The exception, though, is in areas with high satyr/human populations. Because of the cross-cultural osmosis that happens, fauns can start to adopt more human/satyr concepts of gender and then these things DO start getting looked at sideways. A faun is still the gender determined by their horn shape, but if the other things dont 'match', then they can get treated juuuust oddly. More like a wether, but still not wether enough to BE a wether. They might get treated like a wether who's not doing it right.
